


The Mourning of the Walls

by RoxanneRolls



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 17:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30008400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoxanneRolls/pseuds/RoxanneRolls
Summary: This is an ATC for the Season 18 episode "Winter Chill."  The development in that episode has haunted me.  Certainly, Fornell would be devastated, but it is also a major blow for Gibbs. This is a very brief look into the moment we saw at Gibbs' house at the end of the episode.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	The Mourning of the Walls

**The Mourning of the Walls**

ATC for “Winter Chill”

by Roxanne Rolls (MAHC)

It had been years since Gibbs had really noticed the creaks and groans of his old house when everything else was silent. The first time was decades past, in those numb, surreal weeks after he lost his girls; rooms that had been warm with joy and laughter and love were cold and empty, and the walls mourned audibly. 

Over the next 30 years, as he fought to wrestle his soul free of that pain and devastation, he managed occasionally to silence the house. During the somewhat happy early days of his three subsequent marriages, he did not pay much attention, and his various other liaisons created enough ambient noise to drown out the subtle clicks and pops of a settling foundation. After each relationship ended, though, the creaks returned, punctuating his failures, sometimes accusative, sometimes mournful. 

Finally, after he survived almost-dying in Iraq, and after he and Tim returned from torture and starvation in Paraguay, he managed to break through the dark quagmire of the past to stretch toward the light that could be his future. And for a while, the walls were quiet.

But it had taken only a moment, a horrible, unbelievable, gut-wrenching moment, to plunge him back into the thick, despairing depths. 

He sat in silence, long legs angled out from where he perched uneasily on his couch, large hands cradling a plain white coffee cup – the only action he could manage in the helplessness. Briefly, he glanced up at Fornell, who sat, stunned and staring, the mug Gibbs had just brought him sitting, ignored, on the low table between them. Only a couple of hours before, he had held his friend close, hand cupping the back of his head as the grieving father sobbed in his embrace. In the moment, Gibbs had shoved his own heartache away, swallowed his own tears until he could permit himself to deal with losing the vibrant young woman who had the passionate fire of her mother and called him Uncle Gibbs.

As deeply as he hurt, as much as he lamented, he knew Tobias needed his strength now. Later, he would smash the newly-varnished hull of his boat. Later, he would deaden the pain with bourbon and lose consciousness under his wounded vessel. Later, he would re-live the misery of Shannon and Kelly’s deaths and ache anew over the fresh loss of Emily Fornell. Later.

Somewhere in the haze that fogged his brain, Gibbs realized that he and Tobias were now brothers linked in the most dreadful of ways. He had felt Tobias’ agony, echoed his tortured moans, shared his shredded heart.

There, in his house, the one that he once shared with his family, he and his brother sat, only a few hours removed from the desolate reality of the Trauma Room at Washington General, unable – or maybe unwilling – to comprehend the nightmare they had been thrust into. The coffee cooled in their mugs as they stared ahead, as they looked out the window, as they gazed unseeingly at the floor.

And only the mourning of the walls trespassed into the heavy silence.


End file.
